Ivan Tomko Mrnavić is a rather versatile historical and literary figure. Mrnavić has worked in the atmosphere of Croatian Baroque Slavism and it is he who introduces the idea of autochthony of the Slav population on Dalmatian territory.
Mrnavić is famous for his rich literary opus and this graduation thesis deals with the third chapter from his De Illyrico Caesaribusque Illyricis where he describes the Roman province of Dalmatia. After collating the existing transcriptions, the author carried out the philological analysis and the comparison of the manuscript's two copies from Zagreb and Sarajevo. The aforementioned analysis has lead to the hypothesis of various templates or the idea that we are in fact dealing with two versions of the description of the province of Dalmatia. Mrnavić's detailed description of Dalmatia includes an array of ancient cities and stations on the territory of this ancient province.
It is interesting to note that this issue has not been dealt with in detail by anybody, except for Tamara Tvrtković, who makes different hypotheses about the surviving copies of the manuscript in her book – “Between Science and Fairy Tales, Ivan Tomko Mrnavić”. The content analysis of Mrnavić's work detected typical Illyrian topoi. Those Illyrian topoi serve as evidence of the continuity of ideas of Slavism that had appeared even before Mrnavić's time.
What remained to be done was to compare the notion of “Dalmatia” from Mrnavić's work with the same notion from the work of his predecessors. Seeing that Juraj Šiţgorić's book De situ Illyriae et civitate Sibenici was the first to introduce the topical inventory of the Illyrian ideologeme in its entirety, and Vinko Pribojević's book De origine successibusque Slavorum slavicizes the Illyrian ideologeme, it was only natural to compare the descriptions of Dalmatia from these two authors to the one from Mrnavić. Finally, it appears that the political situation and atmosphere was actually rather similar during the lives of all three of the authors. In their search of freedom from foreign rulers, who were either rulers or pretenders to Croatian regions, all three of these authors have developed their own ideas of salvation.
The authors have certainly left their mark both in history and in literature by developing and strengthening the idea of Illyrianism that was slavicized in Pribojević's time, but reached its peak in Mrnavić's.